Because I Can't Stop Talking about Books and Politics

Tag Archives: Nuclear Arms

Happy Primary Day! Vox and FiveThirtyEight both have previews of today’s primary elections in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Idaho, and Oregon. Spoiler: it’s not a hugely interesting election day if you’re not in one of those states, although I am curious about turnout in some of the Pennsylvania districts.

Also this morning:

In the New Republic, Jeet Heer argues that Trump’s affinity for strongmen may lead to a new nuclear arms race:

In theory, the U.S. has long been committed to nuclear non-proliferation. But in practice, the world’s only superpower is always more willing to negotiate with fellow nuclear powers (such as Russia and China) while saving regime change for those nations which either didn’t acquire nuclear weapons or gave them up (Iraq and Libya). But traditionally this realpolitik has been combined with efforts to bring non-nuclear powers into accord with the international non-proliferation regime, as with the Iran deal.

Under Trump, even that modest effort at taming proliferation is now abandoned, to be replaced by a candid recognition that only those in the nuclear club deserve respect. This discounting of international systems, very much in keeping with Trump’s instincts as a nationalist, bilateral dealmaker, could easily ignite a new age of nuclear proliferation. While Iran so far has been cautious, it could look at the North Korean precedent and think that their wiser course is to develop nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia has warned that if Iran does so, it too.

The day the United States opened its embassy in Jerusalem is a day the world has longed for, because of what it was supposed to represent: the end of a seemingly endless conflict, a blood-soaked tragedy with justice and cruelty on both sides. Israelis and Palestinians have envisioned a capital in Jerusalem, and for generations the Americans, the honest brokers in seeking peace, withheld recognition of either side’s claims, pending a treaty that through hard compromise would resolve all competing demands.

But on Monday President Trump delivered the embassy as a gift without concession or condition to the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and as a blow to the Palestinians. The world did not witness a new dawn of peace and security for two peoples who have dreamed of both for so long. Instead, it watched as Israeli soldiers shot and killed scores of Palestinian protesters, and wounded thousands more, along Israel’s boundary with the Gaza Strip.

Also in the Times, Michelle Goldberg calls the ceremony that opened the new embassy–a ceremony that featured not one, but two evangelical preachers who’ve declared that Jews are going to Hell–“grotesque”:

This spectacle, geared toward Donald Trump’s Christian American base, coincided with a massacre about 40 miles away. Since March 30, there have been mass protests at the fence separating Gaza and Israel. Gazans, facing an escalating humanitarian crisis due in large part to an Israeli blockade, are demanding the right to return to homes in Israel that their families were forced from at Israel’s founding. The demonstrators have been mostly but not entirely peaceful; Gazans have thrown rocks at Israeli soldiers and tried to fly flaming kites into Israel. The Israeli military has responded with live gunfire as well as rubber bullets and tear gas. In clashes on Monday, at least 58 Palestinians were killed and thousands wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

The juxtaposition of images of dead and wounded Palestinians and Ivanka Trump smiling in Jerusalem like a Zionist Marie Antoinette tell us a lot about America’s relationship to Israel right now. It has never been closer, but within that closeness there are seeds of potential estrangement.

The Weekly Standard continues to flummox me by featuring sensible, well-informed articles right next to maddening silliness. This morning I read Robert Zubrin’s suggestions for the new NASA administrator, which struck me as entirely reasonable:

One thing that could really help is for you to take immediate action to reverse the administration’s dumb decision to cancel the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) space telescope.

WFIRST is a 2.2 meter space telescope with field of view 100 times greater than Hubble, made possible on a bargain budget of $3 billion by the donation of a surplus spy satellite to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office. It has been approved and strongly backed as a high priority by every science review committee advising the government. It promises breakthrough discoveries of exoplanets, and could potentially reveal the truth about the nature of the dark energy that is driving the expansion of the universe, and numerous other questions in astrophysics. Particularly exciting is the possibility of using WFIRST to obtain spectra of the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. If it finds free oxygen—which did not exist on Earth until we had a biosphere and which does not exist on any other planet in our solar system—that would be strong evidence of the presence of plentiful life.

This is exactly the kind of mission that NASA should be doing, and saving it would do much to mitigate the political polarization that delayed your confirmation, and which could potentially derail any effort on your part to accomplish anything significant during your turn at the space agency helm.

(I should point out here that, as my sons frequently remind me, I had a subpar science education. But certainly Zubrin’s ideas seemed to pass basic logic tests.)

A visit to Planned Parenthood’s website to find any information about adoption is something of a seek-and-find exercise. The home page offers four featured “health topics”: STDs, birth control, abortion, and emergency contraception. Clicking on “See more topics” doesn’t reveal adoption either, nor does clicking on the “Learn” tab at the top of the page. Not even the “Our Services” page contains a reference to adoption; it does, however, include “abortion services”, “abortion referrals”, “LGBT Services”, “Pregnancy Testing”, and eight other services.

I’m just spit-balling here but maybe there isn’t more about adoption services on the Planned Parenthood site because adoption isn’t a service provided by Planned Parenthood? The author is also upset that Planned Parenthood disses Crisis Pregnancy Centers on its site, without engaging Planned Parenthood’s actual critique of Crisis Pregnancy Centers: they lie to the women who visit them. Does Bier think this is inaccurate? I honestly don’t know.

(The Planned Parenthood article was also surprisingly badly edited, with a repeated phrase in the very first sentence and a “[link to this?]” request further down the page. Say what you will about the Weekly Standard, it’s usually more polished than that.)